Posts Tagged ‘Macromedia’

When Adobe finally killed off HomeSite a couple of months back, I had to wipe away a tear at the loss of the first proper IDE that I used for coding for the web. In truth it should have been put out of it’s misery a long time ago, as when I used it for some quick and dirty coding back in October last year I was dismayed at how dated it felt.

Over the last few years I’ve visited Nick’s site many times, hoping for news of him creating a modern take on what made HomeSite so good, but knowing deep down that his hands were probably tied in that regard – so long as the Macromedia, and then Adobe, were peddling the zombie descendant of HomeSite. A couple of times I almost bought TopStyle from his site in a fit of nostalgia, but with it mainly focussing on CSS editing it didn’t deliver the full suite of features I was looking for.

Which is why it took me completely by surprise yesterday when I discovered that TopStyle 4 had been out for a couple of months and now featured tag/code insight for php and JQuery, amongst others. I was even more surprised to discover that Nick Bradbury was no longer responsible for it at all – having passed the baton on to Stefan van As, back in December.

But wow… from the screen grabs, TopStyle 4 it looked like the natural successor to the original HomeSite that I’d been waiting for and, after downloading and giving the trial version a go, I confirm that it is exactly that!

In many ways it’s the perfect riposte to Adobe’s mistreatment of its ancestor. At around £50 it’s as affordable as HomeSite was, back in the day, and undercuts the likes of Dreamweaver by quite a long way. As soon as I can afford it I’m going to buy TopStyle 4 and switch from the dated Dreamweaver 8 license I’ve been using for so long.